The title is "Mass Incarceration and Control Unit Prisons: Crime Control or Social Control?" You all know what we think the answer to this questions is. Let me just say a few words about why we believe it's social control.
First, let's consider mass incarceration. Several years ago CEML printed the statistic that one out of every four Black men in the United States was under some form of control by the so-called criminal justice system - that is that they were either in prison or jail or on parole or probation. People couldn't believe this and we had to produce many references and documents to show that we were correct. Then, just last week the Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C. released a new study revealing that this proportion is now one out of every three Black men. Last year at our program on the Racist Imprisonment Binge, Jerome Miller noted that he had studied this same dynamic in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore and in these two cities the proportion was actually one out of every two!
Some of you know what this means first hand. The rest of us need to think about what this must mean. Think about the impact that this situation must have on Black communities. I could go on and on with different statistics like these, and they all would reveal the same phenomenon - that the imprisonment of people of color is becoming the national pastime for white America.
And what has all of this gotten us? Every study shows that crime does not go down as imprisonment goes up. For those of you who are not sure about this, or who don't believe it, I urge you to read the four page pull out in this issue of our newsletter, Walkin' Steel, that you received when you came in tonight. Indeed, we are no safer for this mass imprisonment binge. We are no more kind and gentle. Our potential as human beings is not one iota advanced. Our future is no more promising. We are nothing more than an incarcer - nation. We are becoming nothing more than a parasite country living off the terror of people of color, with an increasing number of white people dependent on the criminal justice system for jobs and employment.
And this doesn't even begin to address chain gangs or the death penalty or Pell grants, or any of the rest.
Well, then, Newt and his buddies might say, if mass incarceration doesn't bringing down the crime rate, perhaps the future lies in control unit prisons. Ten years ago in, 1985, when we began our work, there was only one control unit prison. It was Marion prison. Now the number of control units is about 40. And are we safer for that? Are the prisons safer? Has any good come of that? When we in CEML debated the Bureau of Prisons about the value of Marion ten years ago, they insisted, "Give us Marion and we will put all the bad apples there and that will free up the rest of the prison system."
We said that's not true. Rather than freeing up the system, Marion would serve as an anchor and pull the system in a more and more repressive direction. Now, ten years later, we have 40 Marions - - each one more barbaric than the one before, and nothing has improved as a result. Just to say the names of these torture chambers is to spread revulsion: Marion, Florence, Pelican Bay, Southport, Westville, and so on down the line. These are some of the main obscenities of white America.
Let's do one more thing. Let's look at an historical context. The imprisonment rate in the United States, which had been more or less steady between 1925 and 1971, started to soar in 1972. And that was the same year that onewing of Marion prison was opened as the first actualization of a control unit. Both of these things in the same year. Well, what else was happening then? In the late sixties the US Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) murdered dozens of Black Panthers and members of the Black Liberation Army and put hundreds more in prison. In fact, some are still there today - people like Geronimo Pratt and Sundiata Acoli, and many, many others. Then, on August 21, 1971 revolutionary prison leader George Jackson was murdered in San Quentin prison. Just a few days later, Attica in upstate New York, erupted into the greatest prison rebellion in the history of the US, and then four days later, into one of the greatest massacres in US history thanks to the then-governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller.
We don't believe that it is possible to look at these events and see coincidences. No, we see causes and effects. Mass incarceration and control units were not and are not efforts to control crime. They were and are efforts to control the democratic impulses of people of color - and since the entire system of the United States is built on suppressing that democratic impulse, to pursue it is revolutionary. That is what mass incarceration and control units are - counter revolutionary institutions, counter-insurgency institutions created by the US of A to try to suppress the quest for fundamental social change.
Understanding this and believing this leads us to one more thought, and I'll end with that. Although remedial efforts are good, although reform is positive, ultimately to get rid of our racist criminal justice system will demand a fundamental change in society. No matter how unpopular that may be to say these days, no matter how many progressive people have turned away from this assertion, it is the truth and we believe it. There can be no issue of trying to explain the problems of the criminal justice system to the bad guys - they know it and that in fact is why they have designed it that way. We can explain it to ourselves. We must explain it to ourselves. We must understand it and clear away the claptrap that the media puts in front of us. Then, perhaps, we will be able to fight against it better.
Prisons and control units do even more than incarcerate people of color. They incarcerate the minds of white people. If ever we hope to break with our whiteness and pursue human-ness instead, we have to break our chains of delusion. In doing so we will help to excarcerate people of color and in their struggle to free themselves, they will help to free us.
Thank you.